Month: February 2020

Enlarge (credit: NASA/JHU APL/SWRI/Roman Tkachenko)

Following its successful rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was sent on towards a smaller object out in the Kuiper Belt. As it shot past, the spacecraft captured images of a small world consisting of two very distinct lobes, with properties that scientists found a bit confusing. But details would have to wait, as the combination of distance and power budget meant that transmitting much of New Horizons' data back to Earth was a slow process.

The wait for that data is now over, as the high-resolution imagery is now available, and scientists have used it to try to better understand the formation and structure of what is now known as Arrokoth (named for the Powhatan word for "sky"). While the data doesn't answer every question we might have about Arrokoth, it does give us some very good ideas about how such a strange structure could have formed.

Can’t stay long

New Horizons was the fastest probe as launched from Earth (others have since picked up more speed thanks to gravity assists), and Arrokoth is very small, meaning the probe had to get rather close before it could be imaged in any detail. That left a narrow window for gathering data during the flyby, but the papers released today details just how narrow it was. As little as two days before the closest pass, Arrokoth was still showing up as a single pixel in New Horizons' cameras. It didn't grow larger than 10 pixels until about a half day before. So the vast majority of the data comes from a window that's just 12 hours wide.

Enlarge / Maat Mons, one of the volcanoes of Venus, in a model created with radar data from the Magellan mission. (credit: NASA/JPL)

NASA scientists must not have had an easy decision this winter as they considered more than a dozen intriguing concepts for Discovery-class missions to explore the Solar System.

But decide they did, selecting four missions for additional study and refinement on Thursday. NASA said the proposals were chosen based on their potential science value and feasibility of development plans, through a competitive peer-review process.

Each of the mission teams will now receive $3 million from NASA to finalize its proposals over a nine-month period. After this, NASA will likely select two missions to proceed into development and toward launch later in the 2020s. Discovery missions have a cost cap of $450 million.

Enlarge / WUHAN, CHINA - FEBRUARY 13 2020: Medical personnel check the conditions of patients in Jinyintan Hospital, designated for critical COVID-19 patients, in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020. (credit: Getty | Barcroft media)

Case tallies of the ongoing coronavirus epidemic appeared to dramatically spike overnight, rising from over 45,000 global cases on Wednesday to over 60,000 Thursday. But the startling rise of nearly 15,000 cases in one day is basically “an artifact of the reporting” officials at the World Health Organization explained Thursday.

Starting yesterday, health officials in China’s Hubei province—the epicenter of the outbreak—began reporting the “clinically diagnosed” cases that have been tallied throughout the whole outbreak, rather than only laboratory confirmed cases.

The difference is that now—in Hubei only—trained medical professionals are allowed to diagnose patients as being sick with the new coronavirus based on chest imaging, rather than waiting for lab tests to confirm an infection. The chest images can detect signs of lower respiratory infection in the lungs, a sign of the disease caused by the new coronavirus, which WHO officially dubbed COVID-19, or “coronavirus disease 2019.”

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More than 500 browser extensions downloaded millions of times from Google’s Chrome Web Store surreptitiously uploaded private browsing data to attacker-controlled servers, researchers said on Thursday.

The extensions were part of a long-running malvertising and ad-fraud scheme that was discovered by independent researcher Jamila Kaya. She and researchers from Cisco-owned Duo Security eventually identified 71 Chrome Web Store extensions that had more than 1.7 installations. After the researchers privately reported their findings to Google, the company identified more than 430 additional extensions. Google has since removed all known extensions.

“In the case reported here, the Chrome extension creators had specifically made extensions that obfuscated the underlying advertising functionality from users,” Kaya and Duo Security Jacob Rickerd wrote in a report. “This was done in order to connect the browser clients to a command and control architecture, exfiltrate private browsing data without the users’ knowledge, expose the user to risk of exploit through advertising streams, and attempt to evade the Chrome Web Store’s fraud detection mechanisms.”

Enlarge / Imagine a supermarket full of advanced persistent threats for your security team to throw at you. That's what Scythe is aiming to be. (credit: DigitalVision / Getty Images)

As we noted earlier this week, there's been a lot of action in the information-security industry around automation of tasks that typically get labelled as either penetration testing or "red teaming." The two are related but not quite the same—and there are obvious limits on how much can be passed off to an "as-a-service" type solution. But Ars has been looking at some of the early movers in security-testing tools for some time, and one is about to put a totally different spin on what "as-a-service" can do.

Penetration testing generally involves checking systems for vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain access. Red teaming, on the other hand, tests the full spectrum of security by introducing human elements—social engineering with crafted phishing messages, exploiting information for further attacks, and the like. While they can benefit from automation, those are things that can't be fully passed off to a bunch of software robots in the cloud.

Scythe, a software company that spun out of the security-testing company Grimm, has been working for the past few years on a platform that allows corporate information-security teams to build security-testing campaigns—creating "synthetic malware" and crafting phishing campaigns or other attacks that mimic the techniques, tactics, and practices of known threat groups. And unlike some of the automated penetration-testing or threat-simulation products out there, Scythe retains the human in the loop—making it a useful tool to both internal security testers and external "red team" consultants.

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  The Razr throws a mean Hadouken. [credit: Ron Amadeo / Capcom / Samsung / Motorola ]

This month marks the start of a heavyweight fight between Motorola and Samsung for the crown of "best foldable-display flip phone." Samsung and Motorola are both releasing normal-sized smartphones that fold in half, thanks to emerging flexible-display technology. The phones are releasing days apart, at similar price points, with different carriers backing each device.

So welcome to February's foldable flip-phone fight! In this corner, weighing in at $1,499, we have the nostalgia-infused Moto Razr, which launched February 6 as a Verizon exclusive. And in this corner, we have the first glass-covered foldable smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Flip Z, which is launching a week later, February 14, as an AT&T and Sprint device for $1,380. FIGHT!

Both of these devices represent a second take on the foldable smartphone after the launch of the Galaxy Fold. Motorola takes the approach of doing away with a crease in the display, thanks to a collapsable hinge mechanism that folds the display into a gentle loop rather than a hard crease. Samsung, meanwhile, is the first to market with the holy grail for foldable smartphones: flexible glass. The Galaxy Z Flip's glass display cover can be folded in half just like the plastic display covers on other phones, but it provides more protection from scratches and punctures, along with feeling a lot smoother and harder than bubbly plastic.